Discontinued annotations editor on May 2, 2017

Update: We will stop showing existing annotations to viewers starting January 15, 2019. All existing annotations will be removed.

We’re committed to helping you reach more fans and keep them engaged. That’s why we built products like cards and end screens, which are mobile-friendly tools that let you poll your audience, link to merchandise, recommend videos, and more.

As adoption of end screens and cards has grown, the use of annotations has decreased by over 70%. For this reason, we discontinued annotations editor in May 2017.

This means you can no longer add new or edit existing annotations, only delete them. Existing annotations still show when using a desktop computer.

We also wanted to give you more context:

End screens and cards work on mobile: We launched the annotations editor in 2008, before the world went mobile. With 60% of YouTube’s watch time now on mobile, why go through the work of creating annotations that won’t even reach the majority of your audience? End screens and cards work on mobile and desktop, giving you more bang for your buck.

End screens and cards are more engaging for your viewers: We’ve found that end screens and cards generate 7 times more clicks across YouTube. In fact, viewers generally don’t love annotations, and on average they close 12 annotations before they click on one of them. And more and more viewers turn off annotations altogether.

End screens are easier to create: We heard from many creators that adding annotations at the end of your videos is hard. With end screens, we made that process much quicker and easier—in fact, up to 10 times quicker. You can now import end screens from other videos or use dynamic overlays to save yourself even more time.